The 17-year-old Canyon Crest Academy senior on Tuesday won the top award in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search contest along with $100,000 in scholarship money with his research into potential new drugs to prevent influenza outbreaks.

In all, he’s earned $250,000 in prize money by winning a trifecta of impressive science competitions in the past year — the Intel contest, the national Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology and the grand prize in the international Google Science Fair.

“I was incredibly excited. I had no idea I was going to win,” said Chen, reached in Washington, D.C., shortly after being named the top winner. “If I had placed between fifth and tenth, I would have been incredibly happy.”

Sometimes called the high school version of the Nobel Prize, the Intel science talent search is one of the oldest and most prestigious pre-college national science and math competition in the country. This year’s competition attracted nearly 1,800 entries.

President Barack Obama on Friday welcomed the 40 student finalists of the 2014 Intel Science Talent Search to the White House. — Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

Chen’s winning project combined supercomputer modeling of certain molecules with experimental research to speed up the discovery of influenza virus inhibitors. He was mentored on the project by two University of California San Diego professors.

Officials have said the teen’s research has identified candidates for new anti-flu drugs and the university has applied for patents on those potential medications. Chen said he hopes his work will lead to a new class of drugs to control flu outbreaks during a pandemic, allowing time for a vaccine to be developed.

Despite his earlier wins, Chen said he wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic at Tuesday’s award ceremony at the National Building Museum. As part of the competition, finalists presented their projects and met with five panels of judges for interview sessions over a two-day period.

The judges “ask you out-of-the-blue questions and see how you answer them,” Chen said.

He recalled one of the questions as: If you fix a camera in one place and every Sunday take a picture at 3:30 p.m. and then take all the photos and superimpose them on top of each other, what shape will that form?

“You are wondering what the question is,” he said, laughing.

Story has been changed to clarify that the contest originally was called the Westinghouse Science Talent Search before it had the Intel name.

The youngest of child of an associate professor at Scripps Research Institute and a scientist at the VA Hospital, Chen said he didn’t think he answered the interview questions well, especially after talking to some of the other 40 finalists.

“I felt like a lot of the other students, they blew me away,” he said. “Not only their projects but just how smart they were, how they could think differently than the average person.”

On Friday, Chen and the other finalists were greeted by President Barack Obama at a White House event.

His father said he’s been surprised by his son’s streak of contest wins and says that luck has to be a factor.

“There are equally qualifying projects, equal or even smarter students in some other aspects. So we cannot explain why, other than luck,” said Longchuan Chen, a researcher in diagnostics at the VA Hospital in San Diego.

With his older daughter studying premed at UCLA, the elder Chen said it is “a relief for us” that Eric’s winnings will cover his future college tuition.

Winners of the Intel contest -- known for its first 57 years as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search --have gone on to win eight Nobel Prizes, two Fields Medals (a prestigious prize in mathematics), five National Medals of Science and 11 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships in the past 73 years, organizers said.

“There’s a history of people going on to have great careers in science. I think it will be something that Eric will remember to encourage himself, to remind himself to do something great,” his father said. Accepted to Harvard and Stanford universities, Chen has not yet decided where he’ll go to school in the fall. He also is unsure of what he wants to study.

As for the immediate future, Chen has a math competition at his high school later this week and also plans to compete in two science contests in the coming weeks.

“I need to fly home and probably sleep a lot,” he said. He said.

One benefit of the science contests, he said, has been the encouraging feedback he’s heard from judges and others about his research.

“I feel like having all this support and publicity is helpful in getting many people to know that this is here, this is what I have and hopefully we can work together to solve these problems and get these discoveries onto the market,” he said.